Albert Sherer Jr., Helsinki Negotiator

Memorial services are being planned for Albert W. Sherer Jr., 70, a career diplomat who represented the United States during the formation of the human-rights document known as the Helsinki Accords.

Mr. Sherer died Saturday at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

In 1974 and 1975, Mr. Sherer led the U.S. delegation to Helsinki for the 35-nation European Security Conference. After 30 months of presummit negotiations, the nations present signed a charter recognizing a European map changed by Soviet annexation and pledging that Soviet-bloc nations would allow a freer flow of information and individuals across those borders.

Mr. Sherer was a U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under President Gerald Ford. In the Security Council, his dissenting votes vetoed the admission of Angola to the U.N. and a resolution asking Israel to withdraw from all Arab-occupied territories by June 1, 1977. In 1976, he also called on South Africa to end apartheid, its policy of racial discrimination and segregation, saying that it was ``clearly not acceptable under any standard of human rights.``

Mr. Sherer joined the U.S. State Department in 1946 and was assigned first to Tangier, Morocco, and then to Budapest, Hungary. He left the Budapest assignment after the Hungarian government expelled him and two other Americans on charges that they spied for an anticommunist group led by Archbishop Joszef Groesz. For several years during the 1950s, Mr. Sherer worked for the department`s Office of Eastern European Affairs in Washington, D.C. He then was assigned to the department mission in Warsaw, where he served from 1961 to 1966.

Mr. Sherer, a Wheaton native, received a bachelor`s degree from Yale University in 1938 and graduated from Harvard Law School in 1941. He was admitted to the Illinois Bar Association and briefly practiced law in Chicago until the United States entered World War II.

Between 1941 and 1945, he flew 30 bombing raids in the South Pacific.

During his 33 years with the State Department, Mr. Sherer was named to several ambassadorships.

In 1979, he left the State Department and lived in Greenwich, Conn. until 1984, when he moved to Chicago. At the time of his death, he was an adjunct professor at the Northwestern University Legal Assistance Clinic.

He is survived by his wife, Carroll; a daughter, Susan Sherer Osnos; two sons, Peter R. and Anthony W.; three grandchildren; and a sister.